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| By Guy Benoit |
I saw The Breakfast Club at the Warwick Showcase on February 15th, 1985. Almost 30 years ago to the day. I was 15 years old.
I went with my neighbor, a fantastic guy, an older kid who hipped me to The Ramones and Iggy Pop, and who answered all my weird questions about America.
At the theater, we sat next to complete strangers, and, unusually, started up a conversation. We talked about Eraserhead. New friends.
The Breakfast Club came on, and it was the best movie I had ever seen. It seemed to have been written for me. Hundreds of thousands of kids across America thought the same thing, and we were all correct.
At the end of the movie, my friend and I stood up and shook hands with the complete strangers with whom we had been discussing Eraserhead. They had loved The Breakfast Club, too.
It was the best night I’d ever spent in a movie theater.
The next day – February 16th – I went to see it again.
One of the strangest effects The Breakfast Club had upon its initial release was to demonstrate to alienated kids across America that we weren’t quite as alone as we thought.
All of us had grown up with the Baby Boomers’ bleak view of adolescence – exemplified by, say, Bless The Beasts And Children. In The Breakfast Club, we saw evidence that our post-hippy generation was being asked to make our own way in the world with startlingly little guidance: The Big Chill, you see, further demonstrated that 40-year-olds still weren’t quite done being 17, yet.
Here we were, isolated, in a school library on a day when there wasn’t even any school.
We saw ourselves up there, and we were frightened and beautiful.
I have not seen The Breakfast Club since high school. I don’t know how well it’s aged. There are plenty of missteps in the movie: “neo-maxie-zoom-dweebie;” why the hell does the mighty Ally Sheedy have a copy of Purple Rain with her? It should have been The Cure’s The Top. Speaking of Ms. Sheedy, I don’t how well the fraught “When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies” speech goes over, now, but I think plenty of emo kids were looking to her, at few years back.
It’s one of my favorite movies, and I will never watch it, again. I couldn’t do that to those kids. I love them too much.
Guy Benoit graduated from Providence College with a BA in English. He
has worked as a dish washer, a dog catcher, a filmmaker, a screenwriter,
a journalist, a file clerk and a park ranger, amongst other things. A
video he directed for Six Finger Satellite was featured in an episode of
Beavis & Butthead. It was also shown on MTV’s 120 Minutes.
They did not spell his name correctly. Many years ago, he traveled
the country with a punk rock band. He admires his family and many of
his friends. He has lived in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and California.
He enjoys reading and conversing with intelligent, sane people.
Without him, Forces Of Geek would be strictly squaresville, man.
